Theatre Smith-Gilmour, Why Not Theatre and TheatreRUN, Young Centre, Toronto

February 12, 13, 14, 16, 21 & 22, 2013

“Time Well Spent”

If, like me, you missed Spent on its previous outings in Toronto, don’t miss it this time. And if you did see Spent before, you’re likely to want to see it again. While it is nominally a satiric commentary on the 2008 financial crisis, in fact it merely uses that event as a springboard for a fantasia on themes of man’s infinite capacity for greed.

The 70-minute two-person show opens with a wordless scene where Ravi Jain as an unemployed Bay Street executive in suit and tie timidly holds up a home-made cardboard sign reading “Hire Me!” Soon he is joined by Adam Paolozza as another Bay Street ex-executive who enters and more boldly holds up his home-made cardboard sign reading “Will work for $600,000 cdn”. Soon they are competing over who is getting the most attention.

In a flash the show morphs into a BBC news programme covering the financial crisis around the globe with Jain and Paolozza playing the two BBC news anchors and all the reporters in world financial centres while creating all the sound and visual effects of poor reception, wipes, posted photos and time lags themselves. To link the action more closely to fact, Jain as a senate prosecutor questions Paolozza as Richard Fuld, former CEO of Lehman Brothers, about whether he feels any ethical qualms about pocketing $4,800,000 in bonuses while many of his clients have gone bankrupt. To demonstrate that the rich really are different Paolozza’s Fuld, his lizard-like tongue flicking, is solely concerned with numbers that Jain quotes to him, as if ethics were completely irrelevant.

The historical background complete, the story shifts back to the two Bay Street executives we first met. They are on the 80th floor of a bank tower in Toronto planning to jump. What occupies the majority of the show is the fantasies the two have as they are falling about heaven and hell. Both visions – heaven as an amalgam of every soppy cliché about bliss and hell a Brueghelian nightmare – are hilariously realized. The show ends with a couple startling twists which I won’t reveal.

The show is a superb showcase for the amazing talents of Jain and Paolozza. Both are equally adept at physical and verbal comedy, their precision razor-sharp and their timing immaculate. Both are expert at mime and clown and one of the show’s many virtues is that it give gives Jain and Paolozza opportunities to highlight both the verbal and non-verbal sides of their gifts. The image alone of the two falling and shaking their ties or their futile attempts to resist the temptation to sin when a heavenly ATM keeps spewing out dollars will remain forever fixed in my mind. Their verbal comedy is just as inventive. Jain plays a New Yorker interviewed on television who auto-bleeps his own profanities. In a virtuoso set piece Jain and Paolozza play two BBC interviewers and the four guests they are interviewing with split-second changes from one to the other. Paolozza is especially effective as a Slavic psychoanalyst who gives disquisitions on Marx and Lacan before ever answering a question.

I doubt if I’ve ever seen such an abundance of comedic techniques executed with such perfection packed into so short a space. Even if you are not interested in the financial crisis, the pure theatricality of Spent, the wonders that just two men can accomplish on a bare stage, is so great that the show should be required viewing for anyone who loves the theatre. Bodies, a space, imagination and talent – that’s all you need to create a show. Since Jain and Paolozza’s quotient of imagination and talent is so high so is the impact of the show. For a small investment of time, you’ll get a great return.